Battling for genre Friday viewers, FOX has the premiere of Joss Whedon’s new show Dollhouse, starring Eliza Dushku, tonight (9PM Eastern & Pacific), with Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles as the lead-in (8PM Eastern & Pacific). But hey – that’s the same time as the back-to-back episodes of The Clone Wars (9PM Cartoon Network), but luckily before Battlestar Galactica‘s new episode: “No Exit” or the new episode of Psych. Get your DVRs and VCRs ready!
So here’s what they’re saying about Dollhouse:
- io9′s Charlie Jane Anders, after having seen 3 episodes, says: “I’ve already totally fallen in love with this show. I was excited for it before I saw it, and now that I have, I am filled with a fevered desperation to watch a hundred more episodes. I wish I had a half-dozen DVD box sets of this show.” (and disagrees with the point on the interwebs say that the second episode may be better than the first).
- Ray Richmond of the Hollywood Reporter sums it up as: “Dollhouse” fascinating, but tricky to embrace: [Dollhouse] might be seen as a futuristic merging of “Buffy,” “Charlie’s Angels” and “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” though in this context the latter would be more like “perpetual conflict of the repeatedly rebooted brain.”
- Entertainment Weekly gives it a B-, worrying about the concept and not having a consistent hero to root for each week, if the protagonist is playing a new role each week – but is willing to give Eliza and Joss a chance. Elsewhere on EW, someone muses on giving the show a Friday night timeslot – good idea or bad idea (Hey – FOX had both The X-Files and Firefly starting on Friday nights?).
- Tom Shales of the Washington Post calls it “a pretentious and risible jumble” that “begins to play like a Flomax commercial”.
- Mark Perigard at the Boston Herald thinks the show is broken, but can be rebuilt with some minor improvements. Amy Amatangelo gets a little interview in with Dushku on the show and her other projects.
- USA Today sums it up with “The result is a show that [Joss Whedon's] most devoted fans will debate and embrace, and a mass audience just won’t get.”
- Z at the Baltimore Sun searches for a feminist theme on the show, but comes up feeling that it is nothing but Friday-night fantasies of teenage boys.
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5 responses so far ↓
1 Bonnie // Feb 13, 2009 at 8:57 pm
See, we all just had to have a little “Faith.”
heh
2 jawajames // Feb 13, 2009 at 9:16 pm
Tru dat.
heh.
3 Bonnie // Feb 15, 2009 at 12:12 am
loved it!!!
It’s on Hulu now:
http://www.hulu.com/watch/57885/dollhouse-ghost
4 Scoke // Feb 16, 2009 at 2:20 am
I dunno, I’m a fan of Joss’s work, but this just seemed to be a rehash of things he has already done. That, and the episode was just awkward on all fronts… I’ll give it another try, but this is probably going to end up canceled prematurely.
5 jawajames // Feb 16, 2009 at 2:43 pm
one of the keys of Joss’ work is that it does take time to build up the world. i felt a bit more compelled by Helo’s story investigating the Dollhouse than Echo in her role as the hostage negotiator or as herself inside the dollhouse. perhaps because one of those characters was just programmed, and the other didn’t show much. i’ll keep watching, but i don’t feel hooked. but then again, this was the pilot that FOX wanted, and not the one that Joss and Eliza made first.
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